No fair - the ones sent to Australia were already charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced; and at least they were still in the Commonwealth & subject to British/colonial law & legal process.
Only barbarians would ship their alleged criminals to some overseas outpost then claim they had no recourse to the laws of the country...
OK, this is what happens for me (tested on a different machine, so I'm not polluting the results with all of today's viewing of/. - results from this machine are either the same, or very similar):
Type "as", get:
slashdot.org - bookmarked
youtube.com (page title "YouTube - Broadcast Yourself") - not bookmarked
ask.metafilter.com - bookmarked
Type "me", get:
www.theage.com.au (page title "The Age - World News, Finance News & Breaking News - Melbourne, Australia | theage.com.au") - not bookmarked
ask.metafilter.com - bookmarked
metatalk.metafilter.com - not bookmarked
www.metafilter.com - bookmarked
Another example - type "sl", get:
qut.edu.au (page title "QUT | Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Australia") - not bookmarked
www.visibledust.com (page title "VisibleDust - DSLR Camera Sensor Cleaning") - not bookmarked
slashdot.org - bookmarked
Note that this has occurred, with variations, for me on 4 different machines (2 x OS X, 1 x WinXP, 1 x Vista), in all FF3 versions since b2, and across multiple new profiles.
Look, honestly, I don't expect this to be fixed to a useable satisfaction for me - I've read enough of the FF/Moz dev mailing lists, blogs, forums, and WONTFIXed Bugzilla reports to know that the devs and their fanboys think the awesomebar is awesome, and they're not going to back down on it (embarrassed to admit they were wrong?) - but I do appreciate your effort (and, if my guess is right - Boris? - I know where you fit in Mozilla's scheme of things). And as I've also outlined elsewhere, I think sticking to this new behaviour is fundamentally wrong, at least in a URL bar - you want autocomplete behaviour there, not search behaviour.
Yes, it is a cool concept; no, it's bloody annoying in a URL bar where it shouldn't be matching on whatever random crap appears anywhere in the URL or page title; yes, I'd be happy if they put it somewhere else - the search bar, perhaps, or maybe the history sidebar?
And that's the other side of the US's problems - long-term traditionally low interest rates have crippled its ability politically, socially, and economically, to raise interest rates beyond a certain low threshold. Ain't nobody going to invest in the US when they can go elsewhere for higher interest rates and a booming economy.
Want to turn your economy around? Get ready for interest rates that you'd consider 'crippling', and the rest of the world would consider 'normal'...
Addendum: I've been using FF since... oh, I dunno, 0.6-something? Certainly well before it was considered 'mainstream', or even 'stable' or 'ready for full-time use'; back when it was just a little side-project called "Phoenix" (actually, come to think of it, it may have even been before it was given a name...). I haven't always agreed with their development decisions, but this is the first time I can point at something (several things, actually - the "keyhole" buttons and new forward/back history list are further examples) and say "that's retarded". Retarded enough for me to start seriously looking at other browsers.
Uh, no it doesn't. How long do I have to wait for this to magically happen? Because it's been several weeks now, visiting that particular site several times a day (&/. only every few days), and it steadfastly refuses to move from the 3rd position on the list.
Note that, as I mentioned in another reply, this isn't the only case where this happens. Currently, typing "sl" for me brings up "qut.edu.au" first, "www.visibledust.com" second, then "slashdot.org". At worst, that's WTF terrirory - at best, it's like FF3 has decided "OK, I know enough, I'm not going to learn and adapt anymore", and just sticks with its chosen ordering whether the user wants that or not.
Note, also, that highlighting and deleting the offending entries isn't the answer. Nor is "just type 3 letters - sla". What, do I now have to modify my behaviour to fit in with a "feature" who's purpose is supposedly to modify its behaviour to fit in with me? Or do I have to delete and rebuild my profile every time it gets stuck?
Fundamentally, FF3's behaviour violates the 'principle of least surprise' - that stuff should be where you left it last time. Remember when people were bitching about MS's introduction of the stupid "personalised menus" in Windows? Last non MS-sponsored survey I saw on that, 30-something % of people had personalised menus turned off, and better than 50% of the people who didn't were glad to find out they could be turned off. And yet, like the MS devs before them, FF devs & fanboys seem to think that the gee-whiz-ness of an 'intelligent' UI 'learning' like this outweighs the annoyance of UI inconsistency.
It doesn't - it's just dumb. Worse than that - it's annoying. Annoying enough to stop this little black duck from adopting FF3. Hell, I'm even starting to think "Y'know, despite it's ugliness and lack of a decent ad-blocker, Safari isn't that bad..."
Last year people were carrying on about the importance of muscle memory, and how internal consistency - that things should be where they were last time you used them - was the most important feature in a UI for enhancing usability and efficiency.
Now, people are raving about Firefox's 'Tardbar, which throws consistency out the window and can't even consistently decide whether bookmark status, last visted time/date, or whether the letters you've typed even appearing in the URL it wants to present you with is important. Sorry, that's not a "natural evolution", or even "uniform with technology of today" - it's a big "WTF?!!?!"
Thirdly, the 'Awesome Bar' is retarded, as countless others have pointed out upthread. Sorry to the lovers of it, but when typing 'as' consistently brings up slashdot.org and youtube.com as the first 2 choices before a URL actually starting with those 2 letters (like ask.metafilter.com - and yes, before you ask, all 3 are in my history and bookmarks), then you need to sit down with the developers and explain that it'd be kinder for all concerned if the feature was taken out back to visit the Yearling and Ol' Shep...
(Actually, it's even dumber than that. Typing in "me" brings up www.theage.com.au as the first choice - c'mon, an unbookmarked URL which I last visited about a week and a half ago ranks higher than two other sites starting with those same 2 letters which I visit multiple times a day, and are actually in my bookmarks?. The letters 'me' don't even appear in that first entry until about 10 words into the friggin' description!)
Fourthly, it's butt-ugly. Oh, you already mentioned that. OK, let me pick on the forward/back history. Quick, don't look - up and down; which is forwards and which is backwards in the history? Screwing with the original logical design - individual history dropdowns on the back and forwards buttons - has left users with a confusing non-obvious UI, and the Firefox team with an ongoing argument amongst their own UI "designers" (yes, scare quotes are necessary...) over which of the competing keyhole/buttonhole designs is the least fugly.
Yes, I've tried all the FF3 betas. Yes, I'll be sticking with FF2, potential exploits be damned, until I see signs that the FF devs are thinking of users, not features.
Interesting... I knew of this bug, but not the related "alternating flag" problem. Not surprising, really, since it would seem to occur only with certain encoders and 3:2 NTSC content.
It certainly explains why the Faroudja deinterlacers / upsamplers are/were generally considered to be the best, despite showing no / minimal advantages over most others when it came to PAL content. I always wondered about that...
they can take a long, hard suck on my conspicuously non-Virgin friend, Darth Veiner.
Seriously, dude - you named your dick after Darth Vader? A character in a 30+ year old kids movie?
Why?
Is it black? Does it wheeze when it moves? Is it because it dies just before the end?
Or is it because the only time it actually managed to invade a "rebel base", it was on an ice planet?
I mean, "C3PO" would have been a better name. He might be gayer than a bag of freckles in a fruit punch, but he's solid and upright, and kept going even after all his arms and legs were blown off and randomly re-assembled by a Wookie. Hell, Han even calls him "goldenrod".
Or "R2-D2". Small he might be, but plucky and never-say-die he is too, and always comes through in the end - even after being shot in the head.
Even "Leia" would have been better. Just a touch of the Force, and doesn't the Doctrine of Signatures or something say that a name gives an object its purpose?
There was a time not too long ago when computers would have struggled to play a youtube video.
And there's a time, right now, when a 1.25GHz Core2Duo struggles just to run Vista. Yet an ancient 800MHz G4 runs OSX 10.4.x just fine. That sort of suggests that the problem lies not with the hardware, but what we're asking of it - and, perhaps more pertinently, why we're asking it to do it.
Instead of saying "be practical, use the right tool for the right job", the message seems to be the rather subjective notion that "This ubiquitous computing is nonsense; it can't possibly do anything new of value, or do anything better than a desktop PC, so just get a Desktop PC."
Funny, I read it as "Right now, this ubiquitous computing is nonsense..." - which, to be honest, it pretty much is. It's still very much a solution looking for a problem to solve. I've no doubt that one day it'll find the right problem, and we'll all suddenly wonder how we managed to live without a solution for so long, but that day isn't today, or even in the forseeable future...
The only part that interests me is the potential for a bar to provide intelligent answers to everyday questions.
Unfortunately, they seem to have started developing that potential by implementing the "Retard Bar" - one that thinks the answer to the question "What's the 'News for Nerds' website starting with 'sl' that I visited the other day?" is http;//www.fuglybitches.com/ads/banner/popup.html, because it has the page title "Sluts with nuts"...
All that, and one extra thing: for all bar one example (cable TV), the provider does not have end-to-end physical control over the whole system. Mobile phones / satellite TV have to deal with the vagaries of radio transmission; internet service has to deal with dozens of providers between point A & point B - as well as the aforementioned radio, physically tenuous cabling in an uncontrolled environment at various points, and the possibility of valid-looking but rogue traffic causing problems (see the recent Pakistan / YouTube kerfuffle); etc, etc.
And, just an anecdote on the rest: I used to work for a telco, specifically in the power & customer distribution areas. Every year, people would grudgingly accept it when storms took their power went out - but but woe betide you if their phone went out for just 5 minutes.
(That was an education in the bizzare irrationality of modern humanity. I'd hitch a lift with rescue workers to places that were had been without power & isolated by flooding for days, turning up on site hours after the generator ran out of fuel and minutes after the batteries ran flat, only to be faced by a deputation of locals complaining that a) the phones had just stopped working, and b) the generator - which BTW was containerised, and inaudible from 20' away when running - had been running for days.
"There's no pleasing some people..." "That's just what Jesus said, sir!")
True. I was given a pre-release version of this post to test by a contact at the NSA. It proved to be so good that I've given the old post to my son, the starship captain, who in turn has given his old post to my other son, the xenoneurologist.
I'd tell you how I managed to seamlessly integrate this new post with my older posts, but it seems I'm having some minor compatibility problems which has led to the new post obliterating all old posts at a quantum level. Still, I'm sure these minor issues will be ironed out by the time the post is released to Slashdot.
Place a low power, shielded reader in a specific place on the door (only facing outside, if that what you want). This means that the door won't unlock till you wave the tag past a small area around and near the reader. Hence, the door only unlocks when you want it to, not any time you are around.
Congratulations. Now the robber knows exactly which bit of you to cut off in order to enter your house. See, "security through obscurity" is handy sometimes...
Include a replaceable, rechargeable battery to the reader. Allow it to charge when the powers on. If the power goes off, make sure its a good enough battery that it can run for, oh, say 24 hours. Or more, I guess you could upgrade it to whatever you wanted, really. And since the house is wired anyways, its not like it would be that hard to rig something that would report when your battery was dead, so you could replace it.
I used to work with large and small UPSs & emergency power systems. Here's how the system envisaged in you last sentence works.
1) Semi-annual manual test shows backup battery is good. 2) 1 week later, weekly automatic routine test declares "backup battery is good". 3) 3 days later, power goes out. Backup battery is no longer good; falls over immediately. 4) When power returns, system reports "backup battery failure".
Come on, really, do you picture the super-rich saying, "man, what I'd really like is to be able to implant electronics into the working class so I can watch their every move"?... do you really think they give a shit about what time Joe Sixpack staggers home with some drunken bar skank?
No. But I bet they've thought "hey, I can make money by selling that info to his health insurance company".
But hey, if you're innocent, you've got nothing to hide - right?
It just has to be proved trustworthy. There's plenty of ways of doing that without having "every line of code, every encryption algorithm, and all the hardware... open, published, and known".
Despite the fanboy-prattle, Open Source is not actually a solution to the age-old problem of "Quis custodiet custodes ipsos".
Oh, it's not that I don't trust the reviewer. It's that I don't trust anything with "Symantec" in its name. Not from prejudice, mind you, but experience.
My interest in the reviewer was more like "A poster who hasn't commented in 2 years gets a review of a 2 year old book posted on the front page? How bizarre. Oh well, at least it isn't a dupe!"
Honestly, when I started looking I expected to find that it'd been sitting in the submission queue since 2005, not last Tuesday...
Maybe they're a really slow reader?
Most likely it's taken this long for his PC to boot after installing Norton's...
Most self-described agnostics are just atheists without the balls or desire to defend their position.
That's about as valid as saying "atheists are arrogant proscriptivist closed-minded fanatic fascists who lack the mental capability to accept viewpoints that differ from their own".
the reason you should listen to what this book has to say, is because a fellow slashdot reader read it and says they did a good job.
I wouldn't put too much weight on that though. Your "fellow slashdot user" doesn't seem to be too much of a user, with apparently only 5 comments to their name (dating from 2004/2005!), and nothing in the last two years.
Funny, then, that their next appearance is to pop up with a review of an out-of-date book from about that same time, but submitted last Tuesday...
I believe they changed to a different screw on the last model (post-800MHz) eMacs; certainly the replacement screws Apple Authorised Repairers used to fix chewed-up ones were more substantial.
Or maybe you're just smarter than the average tool-wielding monkey and, like me, look at a screw and automatically choose the correct screwdriver;-)
As I said, they weren't really a problem if you used the correct screwdriver. If you chose the wrong one... well, I was amazed that they'd managed to manufacture a screw that seemingly used tool steel for the thread and plasticine for the head...
I still wonder why they didn't use an allen key like the one provided with the tilt/swivel stand. You could practically disassemble the whole eMac with just that one Apple-provided driver (apart from that damned RAM door, of course...;-)
Meh, the logic boards weren't too bad - a bit of a bear to get at, but I used to repair the old-style Sun / Sony monitors, which seemed like they had 100 screws of 50 different types just to hold the case & shielding on. It probably helps that I grew up pulling B&D drills apart, and did my apprenticeship maintaining BPO electromechanical switchgear...
Anyone who's stripped down 2000, 3000, or Strowger type switches will know what I mean;-)
I really have trouble working out what market segment the Air is aiming for.
It's easy.
The Air isn't a notebook; it's a wireless portable screen & keyboard for your network (& limited stand-alone use). You walk in, sit down, open it up, and work on files stored on the network. It's not aiming at a market segment; it's aiming at a paradigm.
It's a bold and interesting idea. And it's not quite there yet; at the very least Apple needs to put some work into VPN, automount, & sync support in OS X before it can fully reach its potential. I suspect the idea is eventually you'll be able to pick up the Air from your desk, head off to the local Starbucks or the airport departure lounge, open it up, and just start working as before - it'll automatically VPN to your network, connect to your shared drives, and you'll see everything exactly as you would at your desk. Hop on the plane, open it up, and you'll be working on locally stored copies of your important files - which are automatically synced back to your network once you're back in wireless range of your LAN.
Knowing Apple, they'll never get this working seamlessly during the lifetime of this first model - but once they do, it'll Just Work. No dicking around, no reconfiguring, no fiddling with connections - just open your Air and start working.
The iScrew isn't a new product. Anyone who's had to deal with the screw that holds the RAM cover on the old eMacs knows this.
For those that don't: Picture a screw that looks perfectly normal; in fact, it looks a bit more substantial than most. Imagine now that you could manufacture this screw in some amazing material that allows it to be torqued up to approximately 10 ft lbs in the factory, yet deform into twisted uselessness at the mere touch of a screwdriver.
That, truly, is an iScrew...
Old Macheads are nodding silently in agreement. Mere users, who dared to approach this screw with anything less than the correctly-sized screwdriver (#2 Pozidrive, IIRC) and a firm downward pressure, are gibbering in fear at the repressed memory of the experience...
Slashdot Mirror
No fair - the ones sent to Australia were already charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced; and at least they were still in the Commonwealth & subject to British/colonial law & legal process.
Only barbarians would ship their alleged criminals to some overseas outpost then claim they had no recourse to the laws of the country...
... where it's currently 6+ years and counting.
Oh wait, I forgot - they're not being held by the police, and they're not actually in America. My bad.
Type "as", get:
Type "me", get:
Another example - type "sl", get:
- qut.edu.au (page title "QUT | Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Australia") - not bookmarked
- www.visibledust.com (page title "VisibleDust - DSLR Camera Sensor Cleaning") - not bookmarked
- slashdot.org - bookmarked
Note that this has occurred, with variations, for me on 4 different machines (2 x OS X, 1 x WinXP, 1 x Vista), in all FF3 versions since b2, and across multiple new profiles.Look, honestly, I don't expect this to be fixed to a useable satisfaction for me - I've read enough of the FF/Moz dev mailing lists, blogs, forums, and WONTFIXed Bugzilla reports to know that the devs and their fanboys think the awesomebar is awesome, and they're not going to back down on it (embarrassed to admit they were wrong?) - but I do appreciate your effort (and, if my guess is right - Boris? - I know where you fit in Mozilla's scheme of things). And as I've also outlined elsewhere, I think sticking to this new behaviour is fundamentally wrong, at least in a URL bar - you want autocomplete behaviour there, not search behaviour.
Yes, it is a cool concept; no, it's bloody annoying in a URL bar where it shouldn't be matching on whatever random crap appears anywhere in the URL or page title; yes, I'd be happy if they put it somewhere else - the search bar, perhaps, or maybe the history sidebar?
And that's the other side of the US's problems - long-term traditionally low interest rates have crippled its ability politically, socially, and economically, to raise interest rates beyond a certain low threshold. Ain't nobody going to invest in the US when they can go elsewhere for higher interest rates and a booming economy.
Want to turn your economy around? Get ready for interest rates that you'd consider 'crippling', and the rest of the world would consider 'normal'...
Addendum: I've been using FF since ... oh, I dunno, 0.6-something? Certainly well before it was considered 'mainstream', or even 'stable' or 'ready for full-time use'; back when it was just a little side-project called "Phoenix" (actually, come to think of it, it may have even been before it was given a name...). I haven't always agreed with their development decisions, but this is the first time I can point at something (several things, actually - the "keyhole" buttons and new forward/back history list are further examples) and say "that's retarded". Retarded enough for me to start seriously looking at other browsers.
Uh, no it doesn't. How long do I have to wait for this to magically happen? Because it's been several weeks now, visiting that particular site several times a day (& /. only every few days), and it steadfastly refuses to move from the 3rd position on the list.
Note that, as I mentioned in another reply, this isn't the only case where this happens. Currently, typing "sl" for me brings up "qut.edu.au" first, "www.visibledust.com" second, then "slashdot.org". At worst, that's WTF terrirory - at best, it's like FF3 has decided "OK, I know enough, I'm not going to learn and adapt anymore", and just sticks with its chosen ordering whether the user wants that or not.
Note, also, that highlighting and deleting the offending entries isn't the answer. Nor is "just type 3 letters - sla". What, do I now have to modify my behaviour to fit in with a "feature" who's purpose is supposedly to modify its behaviour to fit in with me? Or do I have to delete and rebuild my profile every time it gets stuck?
Fundamentally, FF3's behaviour violates the 'principle of least surprise' - that stuff should be where you left it last time. Remember when people were bitching about MS's introduction of the stupid "personalised menus" in Windows? Last non MS-sponsored survey I saw on that, 30-something % of people had personalised menus turned off, and better than 50% of the people who didn't were glad to find out they could be turned off. And yet, like the MS devs before them, FF devs & fanboys seem to think that the gee-whiz-ness of an 'intelligent' UI 'learning' like this outweighs the annoyance of UI inconsistency.
It doesn't - it's just dumb. Worse than that - it's annoying. Annoying enough to stop this little black duck from adopting FF3. Hell, I'm even starting to think "Y'know, despite it's ugliness and lack of a decent ad-blocker, Safari isn't that bad..."
Last year people were carrying on about the importance of muscle memory, and how internal consistency - that things should be where they were last time you used them - was the most important feature in a UI for enhancing usability and efficiency.
Now, people are raving about Firefox's 'Tardbar, which throws consistency out the window and can't even consistently decide whether bookmark status, last visted time/date, or whether the letters you've typed even appearing in the URL it wants to present you with is important. Sorry, that's not a "natural evolution", or even "uniform with technology of today" - it's a big "WTF?!!?!"
Thirdly, the 'Awesome Bar' is retarded, as countless others have pointed out upthread. Sorry to the lovers of it, but when typing 'as' consistently brings up slashdot.org and youtube.com as the first 2 choices before a URL actually starting with those 2 letters (like ask.metafilter.com - and yes, before you ask, all 3 are in my history and bookmarks), then you need to sit down with the developers and explain that it'd be kinder for all concerned if the feature was taken out back to visit the Yearling and Ol' Shep...
(Actually, it's even dumber than that. Typing in "me" brings up www.theage.com.au as the first choice - c'mon, an unbookmarked URL which I last visited about a week and a half ago ranks higher than two other sites starting with those same 2 letters which I visit multiple times a day, and are actually in my bookmarks?. The letters 'me' don't even appear in that first entry until about 10 words into the friggin' description! )
Fourthly, it's butt-ugly. Oh, you already mentioned that. OK, let me pick on the forward/back history. Quick, don't look - up and down; which is forwards and which is backwards in the history? Screwing with the original logical design - individual history dropdowns on the back and forwards buttons - has left users with a confusing non-obvious UI, and the Firefox team with an ongoing argument amongst their own UI "designers" (yes, scare quotes are necessary...) over which of the competing keyhole/buttonhole designs is the least fugly.
Yes, I've tried all the FF3 betas. Yes, I'll be sticking with FF2, potential exploits be damned, until I see signs that the FF devs are thinking of users, not features.
Interesting ... I knew of this bug, but not the related "alternating flag" problem. Not surprising, really, since it would seem to occur only with certain encoders and 3:2 NTSC content.
It certainly explains why the Faroudja deinterlacers / upsamplers are/were generally considered to be the best, despite showing no / minimal advantages over most others when it came to PAL content. I always wondered about that...
Why?
Is it black? Does it wheeze when it moves? Is it because it dies just before the end?
Or is it because the only time it actually managed to invade a "rebel base", it was on an ice planet?
I mean, "C3PO" would have been a better name. He might be gayer than a bag of freckles in a fruit punch, but he's solid and upright, and kept going even after all his arms and legs were blown off and randomly re-assembled by a Wookie. Hell, Han even calls him "goldenrod".
Or "R2-D2". Small he might be, but plucky and never-say-die he is too, and always comes through in the end - even after being shot in the head.
Even "Leia" would have been better. Just a touch of the Force, and doesn't the Doctrine of Signatures or something say that a name gives an object its purpose?
All that, and one extra thing: for all bar one example (cable TV), the provider does not have end-to-end physical control over the whole system. Mobile phones / satellite TV have to deal with the vagaries of radio transmission; internet service has to deal with dozens of providers between point A & point B - as well as the aforementioned radio, physically tenuous cabling in an uncontrolled environment at various points, and the possibility of valid-looking but rogue traffic causing problems (see the recent Pakistan / YouTube kerfuffle); etc, etc.
And, just an anecdote on the rest: I used to work for a telco, specifically in the power & customer distribution areas. Every year, people would grudgingly accept it when storms took their power went out - but but woe betide you if their phone went out for just 5 minutes.
(That was an education in the bizzare irrationality of modern humanity. I'd hitch a lift with rescue workers to places that were had been without power & isolated by flooding for days, turning up on site hours after the generator ran out of fuel and minutes after the batteries ran flat, only to be faced by a deputation of locals complaining that a) the phones had just stopped working, and b) the generator - which BTW was containerised, and inaudible from 20' away when running - had been running for days.
"There's no pleasing some people..."
"That's just what Jesus said, sir!")
I'd tell you how I managed to seamlessly integrate this new post with my older posts, but it seems I'm having some minor compatibility problems which has led to the new post obliterating all old posts at a quantum level. Still, I'm sure these minor issues will be ironed out by the time the post is released to Slashdot.
Recommended.
If my ideas intrigue you and you'd like to subscribe to my newsletter, I have a modest proposal which may fix this problem...
1) Semi-annual manual test shows backup battery is good.
2) 1 week later, weekly automatic routine test declares "backup battery is good".
3) 3 days later, power goes out. Backup battery is no longer good; falls over immediately.
4) When power returns, system reports "backup battery failure".
But hey, if you're innocent, you've got nothing to hide - right?
It just has to be proved trustworthy. There's plenty of ways of doing that without having "every line of code, every encryption algorithm, and all the hardware
Despite the fanboy-prattle, Open Source is not actually a solution to the age-old problem of "Quis custodiet custodes ipsos".
My interest in the reviewer was more like "A poster who hasn't commented in 2 years gets a review of a 2 year old book posted on the front page? How bizarre. Oh well, at least it isn't a dupe!"
Honestly, when I started looking I expected to find that it'd been sitting in the submission queue since 2005, not last Tuesday...Most likely it's taken this long for his PC to boot after installing Norton's...
Anecdote != data, or even truth...
Funny, then, that their next appearance is to pop up with a review of an out-of-date book from about that same time, but submitted last Tuesday...
... it's just PR-fluff designed so people don't write them off as irrelevant because they don't support the single most popular PMP on the market.
I predict that the touted iPod-compatibility will remain "coming real soon now!" until the company is quietly wound down.
I believe they changed to a different screw on the last model (post-800MHz) eMacs; certainly the replacement screws Apple Authorised Repairers used to fix chewed-up ones were more substantial.
;-)
... well, I was amazed that they'd managed to manufacture a screw that seemingly used tool steel for the thread and plasticine for the head...
;-)
;-)
Or maybe you're just smarter than the average tool-wielding monkey and, like me, look at a screw and automatically choose the correct screwdriver
As I said, they weren't really a problem if you used the correct screwdriver. If you chose the wrong one
I still wonder why they didn't use an allen key like the one provided with the tilt/swivel stand. You could practically disassemble the whole eMac with just that one Apple-provided driver (apart from that damned RAM door, of course...
Meh, the logic boards weren't too bad - a bit of a bear to get at, but I used to repair the old-style Sun / Sony monitors, which seemed like they had 100 screws of 50 different types just to hold the case & shielding on. It probably helps that I grew up pulling B&D drills apart, and did my apprenticeship maintaining BPO electromechanical switchgear...
Anyone who's stripped down 2000, 3000, or Strowger type switches will know what I mean
The Air isn't a notebook; it's a wireless portable screen & keyboard for your network (& limited stand-alone use). You walk in, sit down, open it up, and work on files stored on the network. It's not aiming at a market segment; it's aiming at a paradigm.
It's a bold and interesting idea. And it's not quite there yet; at the very least Apple needs to put some work into VPN, automount, & sync support in OS X before it can fully reach its potential. I suspect the idea is eventually you'll be able to pick up the Air from your desk, head off to the local Starbucks or the airport departure lounge, open it up, and just start working as before - it'll automatically VPN to your network, connect to your shared drives, and you'll see everything exactly as you would at your desk. Hop on the plane, open it up, and you'll be working on locally stored copies of your important files - which are automatically synced back to your network once you're back in wireless range of your LAN.
Knowing Apple, they'll never get this working seamlessly during the lifetime of this first model - but once they do, it'll Just Work. No dicking around, no reconfiguring, no fiddling with connections - just open your Air and start working.
The iScrew isn't a new product. Anyone who's had to deal with the screw that holds the RAM cover on the old eMacs knows this.
For those that don't: Picture a screw that looks perfectly normal; in fact, it looks a bit more substantial than most. Imagine now that you could manufacture this screw in some amazing material that allows it to be torqued up to approximately 10 ft lbs in the factory, yet deform into twisted uselessness at the mere touch of a screwdriver.
That, truly, is an iScrew...
Old Macheads are nodding silently in agreement. Mere users, who dared to approach this screw with anything less than the correctly-sized screwdriver (#2 Pozidrive, IIRC) and a firm downward pressure, are gibbering in fear at the repressed memory of the experience...